Julius Lothar Meyer

Julius Lothar Meyer (1830-95), German chemist, best known for his work on the periodic classification of the chemical elements. He was born in Varel, and educated at the universities of Zürich, Würzburg, Heidelberg, and Königsberg (now Kaliningrad). After 1876 he was professor of chemistry at the University of Tübingen. In a paper published in 1870 he presented his discovery of the periodic law, stating that the properties of the elements are periodic functions of their atomic weights. This fundamental law was discovered independently in 1869 by the Russian chemist Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleyev, who received more recognition for the discovery than did Meyer.